Today was filled to the brim with interesting announcements at Google I/O. While Mountain View was focused heavily on new tools and services for developers, a few snazzy consumer-facing features made their way into the keynote as well. No, there isn’t any new fancy hardware, but Google is clearly taking usability and consumer-friendly interfaces very seriously going forward.

Unreal Engine 3, the game engine that runs fan favorites like Mass Effect, Gears of War, and Infinity Blade, has been ported to run inside a web browser without any plug-ins. Using JavaScript, specifically the asm.js sublanguage and Emscripten compiler, this engine can run on most any modern web browser. While this is just a tech demo, it goes to show how the web browser is starting to become a completely valid native platform for games.

Mozilla has just rolled out OdinMonkey, a new module for Firefox’s JavaScript engine that promises to speed up JavaScript execution beyond your wildest dreams. If you were drawn to Chrome because of its superior JavaScript performance, or to Internet Explorer because of its neat separate-process Chakra JavaScript engine, OdinMonkey — which can boost JavaScript performance by 1000% or more — will put you firmly back in the Firefox camp.

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